where the light won't find you
by Cheshire Chameleon
Summary: They dance amongst the shadows of Ba Sing Se.


**i.**

Behind his bars, he waits.

He counts the days in sunrises and sunsets through the sliver of the outside world he sees from his window. He carves the days on his walls of his cell, and longs for his swords in his hands. The guards come and go, and he imagines himself a bender. He's heard enough stories. He could bend the guards to his will. He could burn the lock open. He could pull apart the metal in his hands. Maybe then he could have his freedom. Maybe then there would be an empire at his hands instead of just blood.

 _Freedom_ , he thinks bitterly. He doesn't know what that is anymore, but maybe this is what he deserves.

 **ii.**

There is a boy in the Ba Sing Se prisons.

He has a crazed look in his eyes and a jagged smirk that reveals anger and sharp edges hiding behind that easy sureness. (She knows that smile.) His hands flex like they are missing a familiar weight in their grasp.

She does not know why she stops in front of his cell.

He cocks his head to the side. "You're prettier on the posters."

 **iii.**

There is blood on her tongue when she bites down on it to stop the screaming.

She finds that she's not repelled by the metallic taste. She wants more of it spilled like the red of her nation's flag.

 **iv.**

Their family picture still hangs in the back of the royal gallery.

She doesn't know why her father has never taken it down, but perhaps it is just another one of the things she must do because he cannot.

Azula stops in front of it. Her mother's face looks down at her, genuine kindness spilling out of her smile even as they were forced into the same position for almost five hours. Her brother's countenance mirrors the expression, eyes light and heart on his sleeve. She can see why her mother always loved Zuko better.

"Pardon me, your Highness," the servant's brows furrow. "But is there something you wanted me to do?"

She has a lady's gait, and a siren's voice, smoother than silk. There is no hesitation in her bones and yet, she pauses.

"Yes," she says. And then again. "Yes. Tear it all down."

 **v.**

She comes back the day after that, then the day after that, and the next, and the next.

 **vi.**

"You're a foolish boy not to fear me."

"Trust me, there's not much to fear."

"A flick of my wrist and you'd be dead," Azula sneers at him.

The smile slips out of the corners of his mouth, a cruel thing, a sharp thing, something carved hollow by war. "Not if my swords sliced your throat first."

 **vii.**

He is her last stop on the day before her coronation.

"You kicked all the staff out already," he says. "Come to kick out the prisoners as well?"

"I should. You're just as insufferable as the rest of them." She lights a fire in her palm, but he does not make any move like the rest of the banished had. The fear he left in his village is the only thing he's thankful the Fire Nation burned away.

"Where are your subordinates? You know, the freak with the knives and the bendy one?"

She does not know why she made this stop on the most important day of her life, but the words slip out anyway. "They left. Just like everyone has to."

 **viii.**

The war needs soldiers, and the nation always need more fighters.

Lieutenant Tsing brings forth his daughter to the royal palace. Yen is her name. She moves like the wind and carries the same sureness in her step that Azula did as a child. She summons a flame with ease like she is merely breathing, and her face is like a block of stone, hard eyes and no laughter lines, waiting to be shaped.

Tsing bows in front of the throne, a marble man in front of a glass princess. "She is a great fighter, your Highness. Only 10 years old, but she shows promise. One day she may grow to be as good a fighter as you, your Highness."

Azula studies her, her stormy eyes, her impeccable form, and smiles at the girl. Yen nods at the princess and bows deeply.

The lightning strikes and a great fighter crumples to the ground.

"Maybe," Azula hums. "But now I suppose we'll never really know."

 **ix.**

"You're fighting a hopeless battle. You would've ended up here sooner or later."

He looks up from his pacing and stops. "I fight for the freedom your nation took from us."

"I destroy to bring honor to the nation. You kill for petty crimes."

"There's always sacrifices that need to be made for a cause." He tells her. "None of it was petty."

"If you really believe that," She scoffs at his standards of false rectitude, and thinks of Zuko. "We're more alike than you think."

"Then you're more peasant than you know, princess."

 **x.**

Hands curling into fists, he tells her the Fire Nation killed his family.

She laughs, the story of so many others hanging on his lips, and asks him if she's supposed to care.

 **xi.**

There is a riddle his mother used to ask him.

 _I can follow you for thousands of miles and not get lost. I do not fear cold or fire, and I neither eat nor drink, but I disappear when the sun sets in the west. Who am I?_

The smell of soup cooking over a fire would welcome him home like the breeze that swept him into his house, and each time he would answer her with a smile.

 _My shadow_ , he would answer. He is a bright boy, a smart boy.

 _Very good_ , his mother would smile at him and spin him in circles. _I'll always protect you like your shadow, Jet._

He is a bright boy, and when he walks away from the ashes of his home, he burns with anger. His mother's shadow is not there to protect him; only her ghost.

 **xii.**

A Freedom Fighter dies in a village raid, another gets killed in a stampede they caused, then another gets caught stealing supplies for their camp and is executed on the spot.

"What's the end goal, Jet?" Smellerbee's voice is quiet but it cuts through his thoughts.

He is unfocused and his thoughts are scattered. It's a dangerous thing.

His eyes snap back to her and Longshot, who has fallen asleep on her shoulder.

 _Justice_ , he wants to say, but there is more than just blood on his hands at this point, and he realizes he doesn't know when that became the same thing as revenge.

He closes his eyes. "To get what we deserve," he says finally and it is a promise.

 **xiii.**

In the shadows, the light catches on the gaunt planes of his face, the curl of his knuckles over the bars, what's left of the dull armor he wears.

"Are you that trapped in your own mind that you have to seek peace in a prison?"

 **xiv.**

" _Please_ ," Chains, his second-in-command, whispers to him in the ruins of the village they have just brought to the ground in the dead of night. In the name of the cause, he thinks.

"Our medics—"

"It hurts too much," she wheezes because the shrapnel caught in her sides is deep enough to puncture her but not enough to make her death quick. "Just make it end already. _Please_."

He forces himself not to look away so that he doesn't miss.

She closes her eyes and he lays her down. They lost a fighter today but they took down a Fire Nation village where several soldiers lived. _For the cause_ , he tells the Freedom Fighters that night around the bonfire.

His swords are not as heavy in his hands as he thought they would be.

 **xv.**

In her own little palace, in the four corners of her cells, she waits.

There will come a time when there is a criminal her brother and his peace-loving Fire Lady cannot simply lock away and try to make better, an uprising the Avatar cannot quell using peace, an attack the blind girl will not see coming from the ground, a threat the waterbender cannot drown.

Her hands fold a small crown out of flowers growing by her window, and in the distance she thinks she can hear a boy screaming for retribution that will never come.

In the end, it is only those know how to kill who survive.

* * *

 _an: i really wish there was more jetzula stuff agh such an interesting ship_

 _might post some more drabbles for them in the near future so stay tuned!_


End file.
